We compared people who microdose — that is, who take a psychedelic substance such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) or “magic” mushrooms (psilocybin) in very small quantities — with those who don’t, and found that microdosers had healthier scores on key mental health and well-being measures.

No matter the substance, microdosing implies a dose so low that the individual experiences only subtle changes, not hallucinations. People are not “tripping” on a microdose; they just go about their regular day, whether that means studying at school, going to work, or taking care of the kids at home.

There has been no published science on whether microdosing works, but despite this, microdosing for self-enhancement and mental health has hit the media.

We asked our study participants about their microdosing patterns by having them fill in some questionnaires. As firm believers in Open Science, we have openly shared all our materials and you can find them here. Our findings are soon to be published in Psychopharmacology, and you can access the preprint here.

They were also more creative and open. If wisdom is tricky, creativity is even more so. In this case, creativity meant finding unusual uses for regular household objects: a brick and a knife. Microdosers came up with more useful, unusual, and unique uses for these objects. This is a well-validated measure of divergent thinking, though certainly not the be-all and end-all of creativity.

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Microdosers endorsed less of these unhealthy beliefs. Likewise, high negative emotionality means a higher likelihood of having a mental health disorder, and microdosers had lower negative emotionality.

An Exciting Future for Clinical Science

Our results are promising. As promising as they seem, we don’t know whether microdosing actually caused any of these differences.

Maybe people with better mental health were more likely to experiment with microdosing, or perhaps there is some unknown cause that made people both more likely to microdose and to be creative.

At this point, we simply don’t know what caused the differences between the groups — just that these differences existed. We need to run controlled lab studies to actually find out.

Our preliminary work also shows that people report downsides to microdosing. For example, some people found microdosing increased anxiety and mood-instability; increased aches, pains, and gastrointestinal distress were also relatively common.

The most common drawback was that microdosing is illegal. Did we forget to mention that? Yes, psychedelics are totally illegal!